Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition

You don’t need to be a techie to build a community-based website for your school. With this guide to Drupal you’ll be able to create an online learning and sharing space for your students and colleagues, quickly and easily.

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition

This ebook is included in a Mapt subscription

James G. Robertson, Bill FitzgeraldJune 2013

You don’t need to be a techie to build a community-based website for your school. With this guide to Drupal you’ll be able to create an online learning and sharing space for your students and colleagues, quickly and easily.

Book Details

ISBN 139781782162766

Paperback390 pages

Book Description

As social networks become more popular, their role in the classroom has come under scrutiny. Drupal offers a wide variety of useful tools for educators. Within a single Drupal site, you can set up social bookmarking, podcasting, video hosting, formal and informal groups, rich user profiles, and other features commonly associated with social web communities.

"Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition" teaches you how to create your own social networking site to advance teaching and learning goals in the classroom, while giving you complete control over features and access. Communicate with students, share learning resources, and track assignments through simple tasks with this hands-on guide.

In this book you will learn to install and configure the default Drupal distribution and then extend it to include blogs, bookmarks, a media sharing platform, and discussion forums.

The book also covers how to organize your site to easily track student work on the site, and how to control who has access to that information. Additionally, it teaches you how to make the site easy to use, how to maintain the site, and how to ask for and receive help in the Drupal community.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introducing Drupal

What is Drupal?

Drupal – a short historical overview

What Drupal can do for you

Drupal terminology

Taking notes

Summary

Chapter 2: Installing Drupal

Assumptions

The domain

The web host

FTP and shell access to your web host

A local testing environment

The most effective way versus the easy way

Installing Drupal – the quick version

Installing Drupal – the detailed version

Enabling core modules

Assigning rights to the authenticated user role

Summary

Chapter 3: Getting Started

The core installation

Next steps – building the foundation

Installing modules and themes

Creating roles

Creating content types

Creating views

Summary

Chapter 4: Creating a Teacher Blog

Installing the text editor

Creating content types for the teacher blog

Sample users and testing

Adding sample content

Views for the teacher blog and assignments

Summary

Chapter 5: Enrolling Students

Understanding roles and assigning rights

Assigning rights

Creating student accounts

Customizing the registration process

Additional modules for creating user accounts

Summary

Chapter 6: Creating the Student Blog

Setting up the student blog

Getting interactive

Seeing it work

Summary

Chapter 7: Bookmarks

Assign rights to use bookmarks

Using bookmarks in the classroom

Sharing a bookmark

Summary

Chapter 8: Podcasting and Images

Getting Started with Podcasts

The AudioField module

Configuring the Audio module

Assigning rights to the AudioField module

Creating the podcast content type

Adjusting the existing views

Using Podcasts in the Class

iTunes or not

Images and image galleries

Summary

Chapter 9: Video

Setting up the video content type

Creating the video content type

Embedding videos

Adjusting the student and teacher blogs

Hardware and software to create videos

Using videos in the classroom

Drupal as a video hosting and processing platform

Summary

Chapter 10: Forums and Blogs

Installing the Forum module

Configuring forums

Displaying multiple content types in a forum

Assigning permissions to forums

The relationship between forums and blogs

Summary

Chapter 11: Social Networks and Extending the User Profile

Identifying the goals of user profiles

Using the core User module

Moving beyond the core profile module

Extending profiles using the field group and field permissions modules

Building the profile

Creating an extended profile

Additional options for social networking and user profiles

Summary

Chapter 12: Supporting Multiple Classes

Installing and configuring Organic Groups

Useful links for Organic Groups

Adjusting your site to work with Organic Groups

Assigning permissions to group nodes

Setting the options for content types

Navigation links

Creating and using groups

Adding group-specific taxonomies

Summary

Chapter 13: Tracking Student Progress

Getting an overview of student work

Using code snippets to track student progress

Using Views and PHP snippets together

Tracking responses to specific assignments

Private communication with students

Summary

Chapter 14: Theming and User Interface Design

Basic principles

Setting the home page

Menus, blocks, and primary links

Changing settings via the admin menu

Looking under the hood

Summary

Chapter 15: Backup, Maintenance, and Upgrades

Setting up cron jobs

Backup and maintenance overview

Backing up the codebase

Automating backups using backup and migrate

Caring for your database

Manually backing up the database

Command-line backups of core codebase, contributed modules, and files

The test site

Disaster recovery

Updating your site

Upgrading core

Upgrading contributed modules

Upgrading your theme

Summary

Chapter 16: Working Effectively in the Drupal Community

Getting started

Researching on Drupal.org

Asking questions

Giving support

Summary

What You Will Learn

Build an intuitive structure to allow students and teachers to find relevant content by creating blogs for both teachers and students

Create roles and permissions for controlling access to different parts of the site

Share and manage bookmarks, podcasts, images, and video to support teaching and learning

Foster discussion and communication among teachers, students, and also the larger school community to collaborate on projects

Support multiple classes within the same site

Publish assignments for students in your courses, and track student responses to those assignments

Learn to exchange help with the Drupal community

Discover how to backup and maintain your site once it is built

Authors

James G. Robertson

James G. Robertson hasn't always been a developer. He started his long road to Drupal with a degree in history from Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC. After not being able to find a job that could use a history degree, he went to get his master's degree in journalism and public affairs from American University in Washington, DC. While working on his degree at AU, he worked as a teacher's assistant, taught himself Drupal, and developed his first website for The American Observer, American University's graduate journalism school publication. After internships at J-Lab and the Newseum, he worked for the National Geographic Society producing content and occasionally blogging for sections of nationalgeographic.com. After a year at National Geographic, he made the move to developing websites with Drupal full-time for Bravery Corporation, a public relations and marketing firm in Washington, DC. He now works at REI Systems, an IT services company in Sterling, VA.

Bill Fitzgerald

Bill Fitzgerald was born in 1968, and worked as a teacher for 16 years. During that time, he taught English and History, and worked as a Technology Director at the K12 level. Bill began using technology in his own teaching in the early 90s; from there, he moved on to database design and systems administration. During that time, Bill began developing strategies to support technology integration in 1:1 laptop systems, and in desktop computing environments.

In 2003, Bill and Marc Poris founded FunnyMonkey, a Drupal development shop working primarily within education. Bill started and manages the Drupal in Education group on http://groups.drupal.org, and is active in various educational and open-source communities. Bill blogs about education and technology at http://funnymonkey.com/blog.

When Bill is not staring deeply into computer screens, he can be found riding his fixed gear bicycle through Portland, OR, or spending far too much time drinking coffee.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introducing Drupal

What is Drupal?

Drupal – a short historical overview

What Drupal can do for you

Drupal terminology

Taking notes

Summary

Chapter 2: Installing Drupal

Assumptions

The domain

The web host

FTP and shell access to your web host

A local testing environment

The most effective way versus the easy way

Installing Drupal – the quick version

Installing Drupal – the detailed version

Enabling core modules

Assigning rights to the authenticated user role

Summary

Chapter 3: Getting Started

The core installation

Next steps – building the foundation

Installing modules and themes

Creating roles

Creating content types

Creating views

Summary

Chapter 4: Creating a Teacher Blog

Installing the text editor

Creating content types for the teacher blog

Sample users and testing

Adding sample content

Views for the teacher blog and assignments

Summary

Chapter 5: Enrolling Students

Understanding roles and assigning rights

Assigning rights

Creating student accounts

Customizing the registration process

Additional modules for creating user accounts

Summary

Chapter 6: Creating the Student Blog

Setting up the student blog

Getting interactive

Seeing it work

Summary

Chapter 7: Bookmarks

Assign rights to use bookmarks

Using bookmarks in the classroom

Sharing a bookmark

Summary

Chapter 8: Podcasting and Images

Getting Started with Podcasts

The AudioField module

Configuring the Audio module

Assigning rights to the AudioField module

Creating the podcast content type

Adjusting the existing views

Using Podcasts in the Class

iTunes or not

Images and image galleries

Summary

Chapter 9: Video

Setting up the video content type

Creating the video content type

Embedding videos

Adjusting the student and teacher blogs

Hardware and software to create videos

Using videos in the classroom

Drupal as a video hosting and processing platform

Summary

Chapter 10: Forums and Blogs

Installing the Forum module

Configuring forums

Displaying multiple content types in a forum

Assigning permissions to forums

The relationship between forums and blogs

Summary

Chapter 11: Social Networks and Extending the User Profile

Identifying the goals of user profiles

Using the core User module

Moving beyond the core profile module

Extending profiles using the field group and field permissions modules

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